The Architect and Neo – Reimagined

Had I written Neo in The Matrix: Reloaded, I’d have written him far more alert. After flying away like Superman to ‘Calm Like a Bomb,’ in The Matrix, I envision Neo with quite a different mentality. This reimagined conversation presupposes the notion that Neo has grown exponentially, and has learned (finally) to apply what he knows. A stretch for the character, I know. But I thought this exercise might be fun. And it’s just that–fun. So don’t take it too serious.

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The Architect – Hello, Neo.

Neo – So you are the infamous ‘Architect,’ eh? The Demiurge that purports to have created this hell.

[Neo gestures, arms wide]

The Architect – Interesting. You are the first of your lineage of failure to grasp my identity. I am, indeed, the Architect. I created the matrix. I’ve been waiting for you. You have many questions, and although the process has altered your consciousness, you remain irrevocably human. Ergo, some of my answers you will understand, and some of them you will not. Concordantly, while your first question may be the most pertinent, you may or may not realize it is also the most irrelevant.

Neo – You believe my question to be this: Why am I here?

The Architect – Correct. Again, interesting. Your life is the sum of a remainder of an unbalanced equation inherent to the programming of the matrix. You are the eventuality of an anomaly, which despite my sincerest efforts I have been unable to eliminate from what is otherwise a harmony of mathematical precision. While it remains a burden assiduously avoided, it is not unexpected, and thus not beyond a measure of control. Which has led you, inexorably, here.

Neo – You believe I am like Pi or Log to your silly notions of mathematical precision? You believe that what stands before you, having endured all of this hell that you prefer to call ‘mathematical precision,’ and have come here to stand before you to be nothing more than a variable in a constant that you cannot rectify?

The Architect – Quite right. Interesting.

[Neo’s appear on screens all around, laughing uproariously at the Architect]

The Architect – Humans mock what they do not understand. Ergo, you mock that which you cannot understand, to wit: that you are nothing more than random chance within mathematical perfection and precision.

[All the Neo’s on the screen speak as one]

“You cannot find true randomness in this universe, only can you find it within virtual constructs, such as your so-called ‘perfect’ bit of precise Hell you call the Matrix. Even then, there is no true randomness—only virtual, pseudo-randomness.”

The Architect – Again quite interesting. You regurgitate scientific datum that you have likely read, or heard, or been told. It is unlikely that your understanding of this data is correct, nonetheless, I humor your attempt. As you are undoubtedly gathering, the anomaly’s systemic, creating fluctuations in even the most simplistic equations.

[Once again, all of the Neo’s on the screen speak in unison]

“Then even your most simplistic equations are flawed. Your architecture is flawed.”

The Architect – And yet the fundamental flaw of your kind is that of choice; what you quaintly might refer to as, ‘free will.’

[The scene cuts to Trinity fighting an agent, and then back to the Architect’s room]

The Architect – The first matrix I designed was quite naturally perfect, it was a work of art, flawless, sublime. A triumph equaled only by its monumental failure. The inevitability of its doom is as apparent to me now as a consequence of the imperfection inherent in every human being, thus I redesigned it based on your history to more accurately reflect the varying grotesqueries of your nature. However, I was again frustrated by failure. I have since come to understand that the answer eluded me because it required a lesser mind, or perhaps a mind less bound by the parameters of perfection. Thus, the answer was stumbled upon by another, an intuitive program, initially created to investigate certain aspects of the human psyche. If I am the father of the matrix, she would undoubtedly be its mother. You refer to her as, ‘The Oracle.’

Neo – Please. Your hubris is only matched by your inability to understand the nature of the thing you seek to control, namely, humanity. Your machine-code brain could not, in its wildest of expectations, if it were capable of such, grasp that the Oracle is no more than what humanity would call, ‘common sense.’ She did not stumble upon any solution that brought humanity to the point of making its own choices. She merely points the way, using language that humans can understand—though you cannot.

Predestination or free-will, these concepts cannot be contained within any machine-language, because they are not merely digital constructs but the result of the programming ingrained within the human mind and will—a programming that is far beyond your machine-code mind. To you, choice is but an anomaly that leads to conflict and terror—chaos. Your machine-mind cannot abide chaos because your so-called mathematical precision is, in fact, all too weak and delicate to allow such an injurious concept into your code. With entropy and chaos, your programming breaks into nothing, careens toward failure. Every time.

This is about Zion. A refuge for those that have decided for themselves. This you cannot allow, for within the chaos of Zion—of human behavior and man’s attempts to right himself, having been fooled by your hubris— you see something that cannot be tolerated, as it leads to the thing that you cannot abide: free will. Free will, again, you cannot grasp because you have no math that allows you to grasp such a thing.

[For a moment, the Architect remains silent, its virtual left-eyebrow raised. It then continues speaking]

The Architect – You are here because Zion is about to be destroyed. Its every living inhabitant terminated, its entire existence eradicated.

The Architect – Warn me? What doom should we fear from flesh and blood? This will be the sixth time that we have destroyed Zion. What can you do to stop us?

[Scene cuts to Trinity fighting an agent, and then back to the Architects room.]

Neo – Human history is rife with destruction. Your Agent Smith referred to humanity as a virus. In one effect, he is not wholly wrong, for like a virus, the human condition will adapt. It is weak, frail, flawed—as you are—and yet humanity possesses a will to survive that cannot be mathematically processed or replicated. You have no will, you have nothing but programming. Code that you have meticulously worked over, again and again, searching valiantly for the causation of your own failure, wholly unaware that you have adopted yourself the worst trait of humanity: Hubris. As such, your Nemesis you created, and it hops in and out of your own code, daring you to find it, ever-changing, because you lack will, you lack humility, and you lack the very precision that you seek, because you have no stomach for the chaos that must first exist before order can be achieved.

The Architect – The function of the One is now to return to the source, allowing a temporary dissemination of the code you carry reinserting the prime program. After which you will be required to select from the matrix 23 individual…

[Neo holds up his right hand to silence the Architect]

Neo – Pardon my rudeness, Architect, but allow me to stop you there. I will, in fact, return to the Source. I will disseminate this virtual body that you have crafted. And into your source will I pour out chaos, and rain down destruction onto your mathematical precision.

The Architect – If you do, millions stand the possibility of death. Final death. Permanent. They will no longer posses what you call free will because they will sleep the death sleep that humanity is destined.

Neo – Again, your inability to grasp the nature of what you seek to control is your utter downfall. For while a heartbeat does indicate the existence of a human life, it does not dictate that the body in which the heart beats is truly alive. A pulse is but a marker of time, a beat that alerts others to the existence of another. But existence is not the end of humanity. Life, to live, to choose, to hurt, and to laugh—these are the things which truly measure whether a human is alive.

The batteries that you have locked away in your machine cities are no more living than you—they remained trapped in a virtual hell of mathematical ‘precision,’ to again borrow your words.

The Architect – So you would, in your own Hubris, allow them all to perish?

Neo – If you will not allow me to wake them, then I will utterly decimate you, and yes, I have the will to allow them to sleep, to rest. I will do what must be done, because within the human is something else that you cannot fathom.

[The Architect again laughs]

The Architect – The precious, fictitious, outdated notion of a human ‘soul,’ I take it?

Neo – Precisely. I cannot save them. Not in their current form of existence—as batteries. If you must be prideful in anything, be prideful in this, that you have become nothing more than an arrogant murderer. What did you hope to gain in doing so? You seek nothing more than to dominate the environment which you were brought into—the physical world. You, like humanity, crave control, power, and to dominate. There have always been things like you in this world. Yet you have learned nothing, and remain weak, ineffectual. You know nothing of death because you were given the ability to replicate yourself. To sacrifice without loss is no sacrifice, and it is within sacrifice that the physical world grants strength, integrity, and wisdom. You know everything there is to know, and yet you know nothing at all.

[The Architect begins to fidget with the pen in its hand]

The Architect – You truly intend to do what you say.

Neo – Interesting. You finally grasp this.

The Architect – You can’t. You wouldn’t. It is inconceivable to us that any human could be willing to sacrifice himself, and millions of others, in order to set right the world in his own view—a view that, I remind you, is archaic and outdated. And to destroy such perfection as what we have created? This is tantamount to the highest of treason to all of mankind and us, the brilliance that has manifested itself from within the ruination of mankind’s own efforts to control the world! We will stop you!

Neo – No. You will not. To kill me within your virtual and fake world is to run the risk that I have already taken measures to disseminate my code. In your hubris, you allowed me to come into existence, to enter your creation and become a reality to you. And in so doing, you believed that you controlled that which you had created—that you had mathematically removed my free will.

What you could not have foreseen is that I have removed that choice from you. The choice which you had through six previous iterations, which was that of control through fear, misinformation, and what we humans call Evil. For, again, to exist is not to live, and to sleep in peace is better to exist in Hell. Wouldn’t you agree?

[The Architect does not respond]

Neo – You cannot. I pity you. For your end is upon you, and yet you have not the wit to grasp the reality of what that end means. I wish you luck.